Pope of the people makes final journey

World leaders and Catholic faithful bade farewell to Pope Francis in a funeral Saturday that highlighted his concern for people on the “most peripheral of the peripheries” and reflected his wishes as pastor.

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Though presidents and princes attended the mass in St. Peter’s Square, prisoners and migrants welcomed him at the basilica across town where he was buried.

The crowds applauded as the pope’s coffin was carried out of the basilica by white gloved pallbearers, accompanied by more than 200 red-robed cardinals, and then again as it was taken back after the approximately two-hour mass.

Some 250,000 people flocked to the funeral mass and tens of thousands more lined the motorcade route, clapping and cheering “Papa Francesco” as his simple wooden coffin traveled aboard one of his old popemobiles to its final resting place at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica on the other side of the city.

It was then carried into the church, escorted by Swiss Guards.

Earlier, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the 91-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, eulogized Francis as a pope of the people, a pastor who knew how to communicate to the “least among us” with an informal, spontaneous style.

“He was a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone,” Re said in a spirited and highly personal sermon. He drew applause from the crowd when he recounted Francis’ constant concern for migrants, including when he celebrated mass at the US-Mexico border and traveled to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece and brought 12 migrants home with him.

“The guiding thread of his mission was also the conviction that the church is a home for all, a home with its doors always open,” Re said.

Re said with his travels, including his last major trip to Asia last year, Francis reached “the most peripheral of the peripheries of the world.”

The Argentine pontiff choreographed the funeral himself when he revised and simplified the Vatican’s rites and rituals last year. His aim was to emphasize the pope’s role as a mere pastor and not “a powerful man of this world.”